Lessons From Building My First Website

I made my first website at http://searchgovernmentjobs.org/ a few days ago - it's at a thin wrapper around a government API that I found at http;//digitalgov.gov. It allows you to search the government API for jobs using queries, examples of which I've included on the search page. The results are all from http://usajobs.gov.

My original intention was to just get something out there on the internet. In doing so, I learned some valuable lessons:

• I learned about DigitalOcean (disclaimer: referral link), based on a question I had asked on HackerNews
• I learned at least the basics of navigating the default Django stack that comes on a DigitalOcean Django droplet. See my post here for one such lesson that I learned. 
• I learned how to buy a domain name at 1and1.com. (disclaimer: referral link)
• Fun Fact: I had originally intended to name the site: searchgovernmentjobs.us - but it turns out that using the .us TLD forbids you from using the privacy coverage provided your hostname provider. It has to do with the rules of the organization that administers the .us TLD. 
• I learned how to configure the 1and1 DNS record to point to the nameservers at DigitalOcean
• I learned that there are Adsense alternatives. I'm using Chitika for the moment. (disclaimer: referral link)

Now that I have the site up, I'm going to look and see if I can do some SEO to get it up the ranks in search engine pages. Ideally, I would like the site to be self-sustaining in that it should pay for hosting and domain fees out of its own ad revenue, but I don't anticipate being very successful in this regard. The Jobs spaces is pretty filled up with SEO optimized sites and the keywords are very crowded. Nonetheless, I shall try, and in doing so, I may learn something about SEO.